All the Right Places: Traveling Light Through China, Japan, and Russia (Vintage Departures) - Softcover

Raised in the suburbs of Washington, DC, Brad Newsham has lived in ten of the United States, visited all fifty, and circled the globe four times. Since 1985 he has been a San Francisco yellow taxi driver. He is the author of two travel memoirs, ALL THE RIGHT PLACES: Travelling Light Through Japan, China and Russia and TAKE ME WITH YOU: A Round-the-world Trip to invite a Stranger Home, a WH Smith Travel Book of the Year Finalist 2003. A guest columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, he lives in Oakland, California with his family.

Escaping from a failing marriage, Newsham, a San Franciscan, took off on a trip to the Far East and Russia; this amusing, affecting book presents his impressions of Japan, Hong Kong, China and the Soviet Union. His inability to speak any language but his own turned out to be an obstacle, but not an unsurmountable one. In Japan he stopped in Tokyo, bicycled into the countryside and visited Hiroshima, where the full horror of the atomic bombing became apparent to him. He found China more primitive than he anticipated, with a lot of labor performed at a pre-industrial level and repression still a fact of life. After a journey on the Trans-Siberian railway, he stopped with a chance American acquaintance in Moscow, where the two took an embarrassingly adolescent delight in circumventing authority. Still, his is an unusual and generally winning travel journal.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.